After all the recriminations, investigations and national soul-searching that followed the 2004 scandal at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, here’s what America’s military leadership has conveyed to the rank and file about proper conduct and abiding by the Geneva Conventions: not enough.

At least, that’s the conclusion one might draw from the horrendous video now circulating around the world that shows several U.S. Marines urinating on the corpses of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.

We know that the vast majority of U.S. service personnel understand and embrace the spirit of international human rights conventions that prohibit the torture or humiliation of prisoners and the desecration of corpses in war. Thinking, law-abiding military personnel understand that they could easily find themselves in the victim’s position, and they can only hope that their captors would also honor those conventions. It’s what civilized people do, even amid the barbarity of war.

When a few don’t get the message, they tarnish the image of the entire military as well as the American people. Not only are the violators at fault, so are commanders who failed to get the message across to these Marines that you just don’t do certain things — not just because it violates international law but also because it violates basic human sensibilities about morality and decency.

Many Americans have strongly objected to the recent trials and convictions of U.S. service personnel for atrocities committed in Iraq and Afghanistan. No one likes to see a service member punished with prison time for wrongs that occurred during the heat of war.

But these high-profile prosecutions also are intended to warn all soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines that they are held to exceedingly high standards, regardless of how much they might hate the enemy they’re fighting.

Some argue that the enemy desecrates the bodies of American dead, so why shouldn’t we? The idea isn’t to mimic what’s wrong in the world; it’s to serve as an example for what’s right.